


Famous Brown Raincoat (The Wild Horses Mix)

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: AU, F/M, extramarital relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-10
Updated: 2011-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:59:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU episode tag for "War Stories"--Mal and Zoe's backstory continues to cast its shadows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Famous Brown Raincoat (The Wild Horses Mix)

_And Jayne came by with a lock of her hair…_

 _And when she came back, she was nobody’s wife_ (Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”)

1.  
“Perhaps you should consider…” Shepherd Book said gently, “That the, well, that the river may flow in the other direction. You think that many of your sister’s…utterances…are the product of mental illness. But can you imagine the burden that one would carry, to be gifted…and laden…with the burden of prophecy? To know the truth, which is so often unpalatable? Think of how hard that would be for her young mind, her young spirit to bear. We can’t know everything that was done to her, or how it may have affected her, ah, her stability.”

“I’m…it’s…well, you have your beliefs, Shepherd. And I have mine. That the universe follows natural laws, not supernatural ones. People have diseases. They get diseases. Or they get given them.”

“Son,” Book said, rising and touching Simon’s shoulder, “Sometimes science is flat out of cures. Then it’s time to pray.”

2.  
 _Sometimes Mal thought that he could trace his history with Zoe by the years of her hair. When they first met, she was a young recruit, hair shaved to sidewalls and a flat bit at the top. That was back when the Browncoats could afford spit and polish, and some of the round-trips of Corporal-Private-Corporal-Sergeant-Corporal-Sergeant-Lieutenant-Sergeant Reynolds’ insignia (back when they could afford insignia) had to do with his hair straggling that bit over his collar ._

 _Zoe’s hair grew out, into ragged dirt-coated dreads. Sometimes there was a bandanna, or a bit of rope to pull her hair back from her face._

 _In the Valley, her hair mostly fell out, although some sandy fuzz grew to replace it._

3.  
The Shepherd looked…well, not pale of course, but not well.

“Are you all right?” Simon asked. “Would you like a beta-blocker? Or a proton pump inhibitor? Or, just, just, you know, some warm water and baking soda?”

“It’s all right,” Book said. “I’ve just been talking to your sister.”

“I can see that,” Simon said. River was skipping down the corridor, singing, “Can I get a witness?” so he figured that things must be fairly all right.

Book gave a distracted wave and turned back toward his room. “I’ve got a lot of packing to do, before I leave for Haven.”

“We’ll miss you,” Simon said.

The Shepherd nodded.

4.  
“Oh, God,” Simon said. “I know I can’t blame you, they took away everything that would let you understand, about men and women, about relationships.” {{I’m sick at heart}} he thought, and then tried to dispel the thought before she could catch it. “You didn’t understand, you can’t understand, but what you did was so, so wrong.”

“Oh, Simon, it wasn’t,” River said, her voice limpid chimes or sing-song, depending on the side it was viewed from. “I could tell Shepherd Book, it was happy news for him, eventually, but I couldn’t tell Wash.”

“You **did** tell him…”

River chuckled. “Now look who doesn’t understand.”

The following week, River got on the comm. and told everyone (well, everyone who hadn’t packed up and left) “The effectiveness of torture in eliciting truth should be assessed in the broader context of who is the recipient of the confession and what question is answered.”

5.  
 _At first, the towns where they built prison camps were glad of the work, especially after the war plants shut down. Then it seemed fairly pointless, after spending all that money and effort to try to kill people, to pen them up and more or less keep them alive. So the declaration of victory was reaffirmed, and the prisoners were more or less forgiven and there was an Amnesty, followed by a Social Problem._

 _One day there was a placard in the alley behind the Beaumonde Hill Town Grand Regency: one of the dishwashers had quit and another was in the drunk tank again. It was a warm day, so Mal’s coat was in his knapsack, and he shamed himself by letting the manager possibly not inquire which sort of down-on-his-luck veteran he was helping out. Mal thought he made up for it, got some of his own back, for it by not mentioning Zoe._

 _The manager agreed that it made sense for the new dishwasher to sleep in the kitchen at night, keep the place safe against…well, against people like him. So he and Zoe had a roof over their heads, and plenty to eat, although Mal wasn’t getting paid much and Zoe wasn’t getting paid at all because she wasn’t officially working there. She thought the devil found work for idle hands to do, and she’d had her fill of staring at nothing, what with a lot of battlefields and one prison camp, so she helped Mal scrub the pots and peel the potatoes. Eventually, finding the company congenial, she helped the maids push the cart and pile a snowdrift of a dozen towels onto each bathroom’s chrome rack._

6.  
“I’m sick of everyone laughing at me,” Wash said, putting one dinosaur into his duffel bag, lifting the next, and throwing it at the wall of the bridge. “Not to mention sick of everyone not laughing at my **jokes** , and sick of being at the bottom of every dog pile, and picking the **one** caper to go on with, you know, the torture and getting humiliatingly rescued in front of people who were trying to kill me and the capper being my wife cheating on me, which I don’t know how she thought she could get away with in a claustrophobic heap of crap with a resident **telepath** …”

He switched off the intercom and propped a chair against the door handle. Fifteen minutes later, it wasn’t exactly his smoothest landing ever, and possibly may have damaged the landing gear a little, as if he cared. Then he was out of the bridge and down the ladder and he punched the button to open the hatch and by the time anyone could get there to investigate he was gone. Because if they thought they could fly the thing, then they could just fucking FLY.

7.  
 _It was a hotel, after all, and every once in a while the maids lent them a swipe card that hadn’t been reprogrammed yet for a vacant room so they slept on very fine sheets on a big soft mattress, waking in time to use a lot of hot water and fancy soap and folded-up fluffy towels that were going to be sent to the laundry anyway._

8.  
They stood by the graves, and Inara read from the Gospels and Epistles, and they talked for almost an hour about what they remembered about Book, mostly things that made them laugh. They couldn’t think of much to say about Little Steve and they didn’t want to devalue what they’d just done so they just said goodbye and said they were sorry for what they got him into and put some pebbles on his tombstone (there hadn’t even been any time to take any captures of him) and left.

9.  
 _The last night they spent together in a hotel room, Mal woke up thinking that something momentous had changed. He opened his eyes. “Zo’, you got HAIR!” he said, noticing that enough had grown back for it to be plaited into dozens of little twists all over her head._

 _Then he noticed that he’d woken up with a hard-on. In the Valley, of course they’d all slept together, everybody, when they slept at all, everything had to be spared out of the nothing they had, every spark of warmth. At the beginning of the war, there was a lot of sleeping together of the other sort, people with their moorings cut and a lot of standards that mostly didn’t seem to matter anymore. At the end, the vaguely animated skeletons huddled under scarce blankets were out of hormones as well as out of hope._

 _Mal was about to point out the thrilling new development, but by then Zoe was already behind the closed bathroom door, in a cloud of steam. Later that day, as they chopped onions, she told him that it was about time for her to move on. Nidia’s Mama had just passed, so she and Zemuel had a spare tatami mat and could use a few extra credits a week and someone to help keep an eye on the kids. Zoe also said that she wouldn’t be working at the hotel any more._

 _“Win the lottery? What’re you gonna do to pay the rent?”_

 _“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said, with a sigh._

 _“If you’re proposing to go out whoring, I’ll break your neck my ownself.”_

 _She gave him a frying glance. “Even sayin’ that, shows how little you know.” You don’t have to like something to be good at it, and when Zoe made a christening gown for Marfa’s baby, all the maids exclaimed over the beautiful sewing. Fahtima’s cousin worked in a dry cleaner’s shop and next thing she knew, Zoe had a job doing tailoring and alterations. It wasn’t what she’d planned doing with her life, but, then, none of it was._

10.  
Even before he took his duffel bag off his shoulder, Wash hunted up River, in one of the sliding panels inside the wall.

“You knew, didn’t you?” he said. She nodded. “And that’s why,” he said. He knew what she knew and so on in loops, so she didn’t even bother to nod again.

“Thank you, I guess. For my not realizing how metaphorically I got my heart ripped out and hemorrhaged. I guess I forgive you. I’m glad that you stood in my way. But…don’t do it again.”

Wash stepped outside the wall, heading back to see how bad off his ship was. He nearly walked right slap into Jayne. Those times that Wash sat alone in a tiny room, miserable and alone on a moon where he knew no one, he tended to forget the “small ship” principle.

“River told you why she run you off, huh?”

“I figured it out for myself, thank you very much.”

“Girl told everyone. There was regalin’.”

“I’m tired of having women…saving me,” Wash muttered.

“That’s just where you’re bein’ a damn fool,” Jayne said. “Long’s your ass gets saved, could be a midget morphodite for all you oughtta care. Though if you came back to kill Mal, well, Zoe gave him his Dear John Thomas letter, but I bet you’d still have to go through her to get at him, and ‘cept when he was near to dead or actually dead he could take you on his worst day and your best.”

Wash was going to hit, in lieu of anything else, the nearest Comm button, but he didn’t even bother. Because, reiterating the “small ship” principle and the paucity of entertainment, there would be Regaling. “What Mal did sucks, and it’s always going to suck…”

“Hey, he didn’t vow you nothin’.”

“Yeah, but I will always love Zoe and, in retrospect, I never even liked Mal so I have to decide where to allocate blame. But you remember what he told you about men with statues? In the private realm, he is a mother-straddling **bastard** , but…what happened at Miranda, never should have been done. By anyone. And so from the statuistic point of view, what he did was right. And if I could stand to shake his hand I would.”

“How’d you find out ‘bout the official heroism part?”

“I was running supply from Lupton’s Moon to Lupton’s Other, Littler Moon—the vein of poetry runs deep on the Rim—and I got in to work one day and everybody except me had seen the Signal and they all wanted to buy me drinks for having run with Serenity. Not that I exactly put it on my resume or anything. And then when I sobered up and could get a run out here—which cost me most of my accumulated paychecks, by the way—then I came back.”

“So you’re all broke-ass too and got nowhere to go.”

“From the warmth with which I was toasted—I guess once you toast something it gets warm, although you can use cold beverages {{or jumper cables}} for the purpose—I would have thought that you’d have all the work you could handle.”

“It’s like them church folks,” Jayne said. “Cheaper to cross yourself than drop some coin in the collection plate.”

11.  
 _Just because it wasn’t with Zoe didn’t mean that Mal didn’t sleep in any more of those hotel beds, and thoroughly on the level. Or mostly._

 _After Mal had been at the Hill Town Grand Regency for a while, the manager noticed that he had fleshed out, and was starting to look downright healthy. The manager knew better than to promote his own cause, and he knew it was no point asking Mal if he knew how to mix cocktails because obviously he’d just say ‘Yes’ no matter what the truth of the matter was. Still, the customers at the bar liked the handsome devil with the line of patter, even if the contents of the barware wasn’t always exactly what they expected when they ordered it. Some of the ladies left their door cards along with, or in lieu of, a tip._

12.  
That awkward witnessed kitchen kiss turned out to be a joke that got less and less funny by the minute. Paper stretched over a pit. Too thin for the tiger to be able to bound past.

It had to be Zoe who went to Mal, because she was the one with more to lose, and because he had seen enough of the ways men satisfied their desires that weren’t soap-smelling and friendly with smiles all around. She went to him, and he tried to talk her out of it, talk her away, but it seemed to him that the worst of the luck in his rota of hard knocks and bad decisions happened when he experimented with hazardous substances like honor and patriotism and chastity.

He figured that anyone can be a good man when it doesn’t make you walk on knives, and what was he doing on that high horse, anyway? Because for all he gave himself airs of being a smuggler, it was armed robbery that filled the cupboards, and not too well at that.

Mal’s voice still wasn’t back to normal, the screaming and all and Simon putting cameras down his throat and other places they didn’t belong to find out what kind of shape he was in after hop-scotching back and forth over the Great Divide. So it was hoarse, when he told Zoe that there was a Malcolm Reynolds who believed in fidelity and connected up troth and truth. “But that man **died** , Zoe. And I need you now.”

13.  
 _Nidia and Zemuel’s church had more bells and smells, and less kill-devil preaching, than Zoe was really comfortable with, but she went on Sundays and holy days anyway. She had followed Mal into Hell often enough when they were alive, and hoped to lead him into Heaven, but she had no intention of following him into Hell post-mortem._

14.  
Serenity smelled the same as ever—green tea and protein and sawdust and arc welding—and Wash went toward the fourth smell. Kaylee switched off the torch, and by the time she flipped up her mask, tears were pouring down her face.

“Awww, Wash, I’m so glad to see that good came outta bad,” she said. “’Cause it seems like it mostly don’t never.”

“And it didn’t start now, either.”

“Wash, you didn’t see it. Little Steve smashed up with a—it looked like a whole tree—through his chest. Everyone thought Simon was gonna die, especially River. I guess it’s no point tellin’ you how bad Mal was smashed up, you’re mad enough that you’ll say it was no excuse and not mean enough that you’ll be glad to hear it. Zoe got shot in the back real bad, but that was before Simon, so he could fix her up with some stuff looks like cake icing. And near to a million Reavers, River killed ‘em all. So the good part? Is you weren’t there. Wish to hell no one had to’ve been.”

“Kaylee, I thought she loved me. I honestly did.”

“’Course she did. You know it. It’s just like--when my sister Lily Anne had her first baby, her husband Karl pitched a fit, ‘cause he didn’t think she loved him the best anymore. Everyone called him nine kinds of God’s own jackass, ‘cause didn’t he love his own Mama and his folks and his baby? And he said Jesus didn’t set no store by lovin’ your folks and he was a Christian man. Everyone else knew better and told him so. You don’t gotta just love one person. And you don’t even gotta just love one person romantical-like. And she loves you a lot, but it ain’t enough to just throw your unfinished business in the swamp and hope it sinks. You gotta stake it and cut off its head. And you know what? Zoe looks sad now, ‘cause she’s sorry she hurt you, but deep down she looks a lot easier in her mind too. And it was Mal did it, ‘cause you didn’t know you could even try and maybe you couldn’t, ‘cause he went way back with her and you didn’t.”

15.  
 _Zoe knew that Mal had re-cast history to remember it different, but she knew that the way they first met was at Sunday church parade, where they were constant attenders. They agreed that it was plain foolish for so many of their comrades to waste their time on trifling sinning around when it was likely that soon they would stand before their Maker. Zoe wasn’t a virgin—there were commanding officers who didn’t take “No” for an answer, and occasional games that never seemed worth the candle afterwards—but she suspected Mal might be._

16.  
“I know what I did was wrong,” Zoe said. “But there was a way it was right, too. The times were always out of joint for Mal and me. And somehow what we did pulled ‘em back into place. Made a rope, that we can hold on to and go forward.”

“What about God, huh? What about what you promised Him? Getting married in a church, that was all on you.”

“Already took it up with Him, Wash. I already forgave him plenty, it’s His turn now to step up. Only way I could stay faith-full in the bad days was believin’ that there was more to the picture than we could see, and someday we’d see it clear. If you want to stay, you want to start again—and I hope you do—it’ll all be about how full your faith is that this was somethin’ I needed to do and it’s done now and the path is recovered.”

“If you wanted him that much, why didn’t you just leave me there, with Niska? Let him kill me off.”

“Dammit, Wash, I knew I had to get you out of there, I couldn’t let you die. And we both know you would have. If you think I had it in my mind all along to get with Mal, I coulda done that before. Coulda done that before I met you. And even if I wanted a divorce, I wouldn’t look to Smith and Wesson for it.”

“No, you just cut out my heart…”

“Ain’t a subject to get metaphorical about. Not now. Not here.”

“All right. You just destroyed me.”

“Anyone else said that, I’d have to slap for insultin’ you. You’re a lot stronger than that. I did hurt you. I gave you my apology and I hope you’ll accept it.”

“Maybe. It’s too soon. If I’m going to, or even if I’m not going to…I need to know. Just tell me why.”  
“You ain’t military, so you don’t know what it is to be a non-com. Makin’ it work, makin’ much outta nothin’, carryin’ water for some fool of a commander who’d make you run if you saw him with a pin in his hand ‘cause it showed he had a grenade in his mouth. Just for a little while, I promoted myself. I did something because it was what I wanted, not what I got ordered. Not for Unit Cohesion. I gave myself a discharge—not that you’d call it honorable—and gave myself a medal. And it wasn’t to hurt you. Wasn’t even for Mal, really. For me.”

17.  
“Stayin’, huh?” Jayne said. “Damn. Rations near to stretched around while you was gone.”

“Thank you for that gracious welcome,” Wash said, sitting back down at his regular place at the table. “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

 _Faith has been broken.  
Tears must be cried.  
Let’s do some living  
After we’ve died._

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Leonard Cohen song, "Famous Blue Raincoat," and by Robertson Davies' riffs on "Merlin's Laugh"--the psychic's perspective is very different from the ordinary person's.


End file.
